


Loyalty

by Xparrot



Category: Smallville
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s06e18 Progeny, Gen, Mutant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-23
Updated: 2007-04-23
Packaged: 2017-10-09 02:10:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/81836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xparrot/pseuds/Xparrot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meteor-freak Lowell's take on the events of "Progeny", 33.1, and Lex Luthor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loyalty

**Author's Note:**

> So after rewatching most of "Progeny" I decided that Lex is the hero of the ep; I also decided that after Lex, my second favorite character is Lowell, the hat-wearing super-strong meteor mutant with two lines of six words total. Obviously his story needed to be told, and since I don't know if we'll ever see him again, I went ahead and fic'ed it.
> 
> This is pretty unapologetically Lex-apologist, or else not at all; take it as you will, and remember as always that no narrator is entirely reliable or unbiased. Either way, Lex needs some minions, darn it!

When Lowell opened his eyes, he was on his bed in his room, lying fully dressed on top of the covers, without knowing how he had gotten there, which couldn't be a good thing.

There was a bad taste in his mouth, which he remembered from the tranquilizers, months ago. He had been darted two days after being transferred from Belle Reve. They had had him on all kinds of drugs there, not the fun kind but ones with stupidly long names he never could remember. When he had first come here, the boss-man had brought in a doctor wearing blue jeans under his white coat, who had explained that they would be greatly reducing his pharmacological regimen, starting immediately.

"Why're you cutting me off?" Lowell had asked, not really caring, because that was what doctors did, they took you off drugs and put you on new ones and stroked their beards and adjusted their glasses and said there were setbacks but it was important that he keep trying.

"Because you're not insane," the boss-man had said, "but you will be if you're kept on these medications much longer."

Then the doc had gone into more long words, dopamine imbalance and induced schizophrenia and shit like that, before getting to the point, that it was going to be a bitch to come down from the dull, disconnected high the pills had been keeping him on.

Lowell didn't know how much of a bitch until two days later, when he punched through two steel-reinforced doors and broke a guy's arm and another guy's ribs before they had taken him down with the tranquilizer dart. He had remembered the freak out when he woke up, in a hazy way. Something about the lights being too bright. Totally stupid. Almost as bad as the last time he'd snapped. He'd said he was sorry until he felt like he was going to cry, his eyes all prickly, still screwed up from the withdrawal.

The boss-man had just shaken his head. "It wasn't your fault," he'd said. "We weren't taking enough precautions."

Lowell didn't remember a damn thing now, though, except the taste in his mouth. He sat up and coughed, and someone said, "Would you like some water?"

The boss-man, Lex Luthor himself, was standing by the bed. He handed Lowell a glass and Lowell drank, eager to get the taste out. When Lowell put down the glass Lex was watching him. Lowell watched him back. The boss-man was in a black suit over white, like he had been in yesterday; the same one, by the way the jacket was wrinkled. He looked tired as hell, which was nothing new, though probably most people wouldn't notice. Lowell had spent enough late-night sessions with him that he was starting to catch on, the way Lex would draw himself up straighter as the night wore on. It was a general rule of thumb, the more awake the boss-man looked, the more exhausted he really was, and his chin was raised and his back was like a steel rod now, shoulders stiff and square under the jacket.

It got to Lowell sometimes, how the boss-man was only seven years older than him, a year younger than his big brother. He didn't seem like he could be Franklin's age, like he could have been one of Franklin's buds. Pretty damn difficult to picture Lex Luthor getting shit-faced and high out on a fishing trip. Or Lex in overalls and a baseball cap, checking under the hood of a car. Lex in a hat was a weird image, period. Like, if he wanted to cover up that head of his, he would, but he didn't.

"So what happened?" Lowell asked, because it wasn't like the boss-man was taking the time to watch him sleep without a reason.

"What do you remember?"

Lowell frowned. His head ached from the tranquilizer, fuzzy and annoying. "Steve and Max showed up to take me to another test—what the hell, anyway, it was like past midnight, you told me we were done for the week—"

"Sorry about that," Lex said, not really meaning it, just being polite. "There was an emergency situation."

"Yeah, well, whatever, dude, that's bullshit. When's a guy gonna sleep?" Or surf for porn, but same difference. "So they were walking me down the hall, and then..." His memory was fuzzy, too, from the drug. "We were going by one room and the door was open, and there was this girl I didn't know flipping out, she grabbed my hat. And then the woman, you know, that bitch you had me playing with yesterday...she...Steve and Max were handling it, but..."

He saw Lex's expression change. People thought the boss-man was a robot, but that was because they watched the eyes; he could do anything with his eyes, make them hard or gentle or blue or gray, whatever he wanted. But he did feel things for real; you just had to watch the mouth, that was the better clue, and now Lex's lips flattened a little.

"What happened to Steve and Max?" Lowell asked, getting a sick feeling that didn't have anything to do with the tranquilizer. "Did I do something again—" If he had flipped out—he hadn't for months, but you never know, that was why he was in here—

"No," the boss-man said. "It wasn't you. One of the other patients, that woman, made a successful escape attempt, and the proper measures hadn't been taken against her abilities. You were unlucky enough to be caught in the middle."

Shit, no wonder the boss-man looked so worn out. That was the second escape in two days, and if that bitch was half as bad as Schwartz, that was a serious problem. "You get her back?"

"The problem will be resolved," Lex said, which was all Lowell was going to get out of him.

"What about Steve and Max?" he asked instead.

He didn't like the way the lines around Lex's mouth tightened. The boss-man answered, in the flat tone he used when he was just keeping to bare facts, "Mr. Pulaski is in the infirmary with a concussion; he'll be fine. Mr. Whitmere died in the ambulance on the way to the medical center."

"What?" Lowell blinked. "No way...Max?" Steve was kind of an asshole. But he had known Max since his first day here. Max had a wife, had a daughter a year younger than Lowell who was so pretty in the family portrait in Max's wallet that Lowell sort of had a crush on her. Max had a Welsh Corgi named Spud who he had snuck into the place for a visit one day, because Lowell had been talking about how he missed Franklin's crazy biting mutt. "I killed Max?"

"No," Lex said, and his eyes were hard and the set of his lips was harder. "No, you didn't. Your abilities were a convenient tool for an unstable individual."

"But if it was my abilities—I—" He was totally going to hurl, and on the boss-man's super expensive polished shoes, too. Lowell swallowed back the first sour burning of vomit. He had never killed anyone before. Almost, maybe, but he never actually had.

He could hear Franklin screaming at him in his head, his face all screwed up and red so that you could see the color through the stringy blond hair over his forehead, _"You freak, you fucking freak!"_, spittle flying from his lips, right before Lowell had shoved the car at him.

"You didn't kill anyone, Lowell," Lex said, and like that his brother's face was gone and there was only Lex with his pale skin and gray eyes. The boss-man had a way of saying things so that they cut through anything going on in your head. A way of saying things that made them true, whether or not you wanted to believe them or thought you even could believe them.

"But, Max..."

"It was a terrible accident. An unwarrantable mistake."

There would be hell to pay for that. Except that Lex had been the one in charge last night, and the boss-man was all about assigning blame where it was really deserved. So that was why he was here in Lowell's room, when he had more important places to be.

Though Lowell had hit a guy for saying it before, it was kind of true—the boss-man was a little nuts. "Dude," Lowell asked, "did you set up this escape thing with that bitch? Like, was it a test?"

Lex looked at him steadily for half a second and then shook his head. "No," he said.

He was probably telling the truth, maybe ninety percent, Lowell figured. The boss-man would run secret tests without mentioning that they were going down, but you could usually tell afterwards, because he would look you in the eyes too much, like he was trying to convince you, or was checking if you were buying it.

"If you didn't set it up," Lowell said, "then it wasn't like you wanted her to escape or Max to get killed or anything."

"It wasn't particularly part of my plans, no," Lex said in this dry way that might sound harsh, like he didn't care. But there was a quirk to his lips, not really a smile, too self-deprecating.

Lowell had seen that expression on the boss-man before. A couple months after he had come here, he had gotten into a fistfight with another patient during group hour in the rec room, nothing big since the guards stepped in before either of them really started to cut loose with their abilities. The next time Lex had seen him, he had brought up the fight. Not to reprimand Lowell or anything; the boss-man had just said, "You shouldn't feel the need to defend me. It might raise undue friction."

"Turner's an asshole," Lowell had said, "he was going on like this is hell and you're Satan. He doesn't want to go back to Belle Reve, but he wants you to let all of us go. He's a fucking whack-job but he was saying you're the psycho."

"You don't want to leave here?"

"Of course I want out, but hell, man, I leave now, I might kill someone. Until I get a handle on these—abilities—" Lex tended to protest, in this mild yet scary way, when he called them freak-outs, or even 'episodes' the way the Belle Reve headshrinkers used to—"I wouldn't trust myself out there. And I sure as hell wouldn't trust Turner."

And the boss-man had made that little not-smile, mocking, but not Lowell; like he was making fun of himself in his head, and worse than anything Turner had said. "But you trust me?"

"Yeah," Lowell had said, "maybe. Like, the guys say you're tough on them, hell, the tests are tough on me, yeah. But I'm not crazy here, you know? In Belle Reve they kept saying it was all in my head, until I was starting to think it was, but it wasn't. And it's cool to know that. Besides, there's cable here. And the food is loads better."

Lex had almost laughed at that. Not that Lowell could picture the guy really laughing, but both sides of his mouth had quirked up and that counted for something.

A few days later the boss-man had showed up to observe one of Lowell's endurance trials, which were about the worst of all the experiments because they were so fucking boring. Just him standing around holding weights until he got tired, and that could take, like, hours, when it was only a couple hundred pounds. So it was cool just to have Lex there, even if the boss-man wasn't really someone you could talk to.

Only Lowell did anyway, and the weird thing was that Lex had listened, so that Lowell found himself talking about punk rock and cars and even about Franklin, before he could help it. Not about that day they had fought, but long before that, like after Mom had died, how his brother had taken care of him, even though it meant he couldn't go to college anymore. Lex hadn't said much, but he had paid attention.

Afterwards Lowell had realized he had probably just been on his lunch break or something, though why he'd waste twenty free minutes with a dumb kid was anyone's guess. At the time he hadn't really thought about it. Lex wasn't like any of the doctors, or the patients, either, or like anyone else, really. He was kind of scary, the way he'd watch you show off your stuff with this fascination that you could _feel_. But it was kind of awesome, too, because this was Lex Luthor, everyone had heard of him, and having someone like that think _you_ were special, that seriously meant something.

And Lex had been listening to him, almost like he mattered, and when Lowell finally couldn't lift up the weights any longer—two hundred kilograms, which was somewhere over four hundred pounds, he'd figured out that much—and set them back down on the frame with a clanking thud and a big long breath out, he'd looked at the boss-man. Had dared ask him, because he was tired and not thinking about it, "So why are you talking to me? I mean, thanks, it's better with something to do. But a lot of the other guys, they don't know you at all, like, you only talked to them when they first came."

Other patients had complained about it, how Lex would watch their tests, usually from behind the observation windows, not in the room with them, and wouldn't say anything. Sounded creepy as hell, like the way the docs in Belle Reve used to watch him. But Lex didn't come across like that with him, nothing like those stupid doubting psychologists who never listened.

Lex hadn't blinked at the question. "I need you, Lowell," he'd said, plain as that.

"Me?"

"You, with your abilities. I need your trust, if you're to help me to the best of your capabilities."

"So you're making nice so you can use me?" It made sense to Lowell. Someone who could do the things he could do, there had to be a lot of ways he could be used.

Lex hadn't tried to deny it. Hadn't tried to pretend he was really Lowell's friend, had just nodded. "Yes."

He hadn't waited for Lowell to answer that, had left without saying anything about what he wanted Lowell and his abilities for. And he hadn't come by for the next endurance test, but after the guards had brought Lowell to the experiment room, one of the doctors had given him an iPod with two gigs of punk, from the Sex Pistols to the Alkaline Trio. So that was cool.

Lowell knew better than to mention any of this to the other patients. If they knew they'd gang up on him, like the teacher's pet always got beaten up. Even if he'd never been anything like that in school. He had never been anything special before, not in school, not in sports—now, he would rock, he could totally bash through any defensive line on the football field; but in high school he had just been one of the losers. Good for nothing, all the teachers had said so, his boss at the gas station had said so; hell, Mom had said so, until she wrapped herself and her Miata around that tree.

Franklin hadn't; but then Franklin had gone and said worse things, that day.

Lex didn't call him a freak; Lex helped him understand his abilities, and said that he needed them. Needed Lowell.

When the boss-man had finally come yesterday and said, "I'd like your help, Lowell," Lowell had said, "Yeah, sure!" Excited to finally do something besides more boring, dumb experiments.

Though he hadn't been as excited when the woman had been pushed into the room, when he was actually looking at her. Not anyone sexy, just a middle-aged bitch with dark hair. Mom's had been lighter, dirty blonde like Franklin's, but it was still weird. Even if the boss-man had told him, very firmly, "Don't hurt her;" Lowell was only supposed to scare her. Shake her up so Lex could see what she really could do. But it still felt weird, throwing the desk at her, making like he was trying to kill her, just this woman who could be a mother.

When he had looked at the boss-man through the observation window, Lex had glanced at him to nod confirmation; but he was mostly staring at the woman, and the look in his gray eyes was worse than any look the doctors at Belle Reve had ever gotten. Like she was as important as Lowell; but there was something wrong about Lex's expression, the way his mouth was curving. A smile, but not a smile. Fierce but not happy.

Lowell had thought, maybe, that Lex hated the woman. Not in the hurt angry way you hate a lying friend or a cheating bitch, but the scary kind of hatred. The scared kind, even though he couldn't imagine Lex scared of anything. The way some of the patients here hated Lex; the horrified way his brother had looked at him right after he had shoved the car at him, for that single second before Franklin had passed out.

Then Lowell was sitting on the floor, and the woman was gone and Lex was gone, and Dan and Mickey had brought him back to his room. He had asked them if the woman had gotten hurt or anything and they had said no, but not anything more. Dan liked to talk, so the boss-man must have particularly told them not to.

Except now Max was dead, and Lowell wished he had hurt the bitch. Wished he had beaten in her fucking head with the desk, whatever the boss-man had told him to do. No wonder Lex hated her, knowing how dangerous she was.

Maybe more dangerous than Lowell, even, and that was why Lex had to know, had used Lowell to find out what she could do. He probably had ways to use her, too. The boss-man said that all abilities were useful. They could hurt people, but they could help, too, and Lex knew how.

But Lex was standing in his room now, like maybe he was here to apologize even though the psycho killer bitch hadn't been his fault. There were half a million other things he could be doing, but he was here. Like Lowell mattered.

"Um," Lowell said, "is there going to be, you know, a funeral? For Max?"

"In a couple days," Lex said. "His family is arranging it."

"You think...I could go? Or to the wake, or whatever." It wouldn't be the first time he had been outside since he had come here. But always with guards, and never anywhere where there were many people around.

But Lex said, after a moment, "Yes, if you'd like."

Lowell swallowed. "You think I'm—ready? You know. Being around people."

"You're ready," the boss-man said, in that certain way that made it true.

It would be strange to be with other people, normal people, like he was normal again. But he had to get out of here eventually, he guessed. Lex would need him out there. Even if it was dangerous—there were people more dangerous than Lowell. He didn't need the boss-man to tell him that. Max was dead. There were things even worse than what Lowell had done.

The doctors at Belle Reve hadn't told Lowell anything about Franklin. They had never said why his brother hadn't come to see him. Too traumatic, it had been decided.

Lex had showed him Franklin's medical records, when he had asked. He had let Lowell call him once, the second week he was here. Lowell couldn't forget Franklin's voice on the phone, rough, and angry. Angrier than the day they had fought, even. _"I don't care where you are now, you fucking freak. I hope it's worse than that fucking loony bin."_

But that had been months ago. Maybe it was different now. Franklin had been released from the hospital a little after that call. He was still in daily physical therapy, Lex had told him. He might be able to walk on crutches in a few more months.

"You know, when I'm out," Lowell asked, "you think I could stop by to see my brother?"

Lex hesitated, then said, "We'll see."

Sympathy in his voice, in his blue eyes; but his mouth was twisting. Like he had to make a decision, and not wanting to make it.

And for a moment Lowell thought Lex was going to say something else. Something about how it hadn't been his fault, like he had told Lowell that what happened tonight wasn't his fault, and made it true even though Max was dead. If Lex said it, Lowell would believe it. Even if Franklin didn't and never would forgive him. Maybe that didn't matter, if Lex did. Lex thought he was important, special. Whatever the boss-man was doing, Lowell was necessary for it.

Except Lex didn't say anything like that now. No decision. Just told him, "You have a strength trial at ten this morning, in four hours. You should get some rest now."

"Hey, Lex," Lowell said. "You know, whatever you need me to do. Against that bitch again, or anyone else. Anything you need, I'll do it."

He saw Lex's mouth change, the flat line curve down, not happy, not pleased, even; but he understood. He knew Lowell understood, that Lowell had made the decision anyway, even if Lex hadn't; that whatever the boss-man did after this, whatever he had to use Lowell's abilities for, Lowell would do it.

_"You didn't kill anyone,"_ Lex had told him; but that wouldn't always be true, maybe.

But Lex needed him, and that was what was important; needed him to help, and that was what mattered, after all.


End file.
